Slipr

“The best way to predict the future is to create it.”
–Peter Drucker

Lately I’ve been employing a new method of coming up with pitches and story ideas for my freelance writing gigs: I think of something I’m interested in. I imagine what direction it’s going in. Then I come up with a fanciful or counter-intuitive hypothesis about the state of that field. (In essence I come up with a pitch and a lede first.) Then I back-fill the research to find out whether or not it’s legit.

Basically I’m applying the synthetic engine of science fiction to the observational field of journalism. It reminds me of my days in the lab – come up with an idea, test it, pursue it if it works or discard it if it doesn’t.

(Another, possibly related trick is to pick up an intriguing idea that is a few years old but hasn’t been covered since an initial big discovery. Often researchers and fields doing cool stuff five years ago are still doing it today, and if you’re lucky, nobody but you is paying attention.)

Both of these tactics help me escape the group-think that is a product of all this journalism-by-press-release that is the bulk of what’s put out there these days.

For that reason alone this is often a better use of my time than simply looking around for story ideas, because generally the things I come up with are unique, whereas any stories I hear about are just as likely to be something my editors have already heard of.

Maybe all journalists do this and I’m only just now, a decade into this, figuring it out. I’d always thought journalists found things out through actual, you know, investigation. As sources of cool stuff increasingly find their own voices, however — through blogs, an ever-expanding array of journals and journal aggregators/parsers, university press offices, etc. — I find it’s just as likely that the information will come to me, or that it can simply be found online.

It helps to have cultivated and to obsessively scan a list of primary and secondary sources that are (in my opinion) excellent but (in my experience) not often read by other science journalists. Update: I’ve since discovered an even better trick, which is simply to keep interviewees chatting until they cough up something totally novel — in this way, one piece seamlessly flows into the next.

(It also helps that search algorithms are imperfect and will occasionally surface things that have nothing at all to do with what I’m looking for but are none the less worthwhile.)

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1) Everyone loves news.

They love consuming it, they love making it. People will pay close to $40,000 just to get a masters degree in it, an investment that will subsequently earn them about the same wage as a unionized garbage worker. Maybe less! So really, it’s not like there’s disinterest here, as is the case with other important stuff like math and science.

2) A big reason that news outlets aren’t making enough money online is that there is an oversupply of advertising real estate.

Just think about it: print readership is declining, but not as fast as online readership is increasing. Net result: People are consuming more media than ever!

Meanwhile, ad buyers, who are not known for being the sharpest tacks in the media box, are slow to adapt to new kinds of content. Just ask anyone trying to make money on online video! Worse yet, as audiences fracture, the job of ad buyers — and the companies they represent — becomes more challenging: it’s just about 10 times as hard to do ten $10,000 ad buys as it is to do one $100,000 ad buy.

3) A media die-off will make ad space more valuable

Advertising, after all, is a market, governed by supply and demand. Ad-supported media exists at the whim of companies that need to reach consumers. As media outlets die off, the remaining ad inventory becomes more valuable. Perhaps even to the point that online ads reach parity with their print counterparts — or more than parity, if you recognize that web ads are measured so much better than print ads that a million views does not equal a million subscriptions (on account of all those subscriptions that go straight into the trash).

Ask any young turk with a facility at creating media for the web — right now there is plenty of work out there, especially when you consider what a shite economy we’re having. Which can mean only one thing…

4) What we’re experiencing right now is not the death of media but massive turnover in the media job market.

Is there a net shrinkage as captive markets that used to rely on local newspapers to deliver national news, movie reviews, stock prices etc. suddenly find themselves able to get the same thing directly from Google? Yes… and that’s even in consideration of the fact that some of those jobs are going to people no one would consider journalists, but who answer the same need, like the coders who built and maintain Google News.

But the death of the media? No, that’s silly. Merely a significant transformation.

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Of all the comments on CJR’s Science Reporting by Press Release story, I thought this one was the most insightful:

Let me spell it out: if you add nothing to your portion of the supply chain there is only a single short-term and a single long-term scenario here. Short-term you add nothing more than what a machine/computer such as Google News adds so you as a human journalist will (not might) be replaced by the same. Long-term even that will get in the way and incur needless costs so any existing business that takes this route will be disintermediated out of business entirely.

In business this is simply what happens when you sell-on-price rather than sell-on-value in markets with low marginal product prices. As the definition of “low” is relative and not an absolute, it’s also precisely what has led to outsourcing manufacturing and engineering which has led to the main reason this country does not have the productive capacity to continue justifying further foreign financing of inflated lifestyle. That’s another ignored story that doesn’t get told when only press releases are republished.

As a whole, corporate America has “screwed-the-pooch” on this as a business strategy in large part to misunderstanding what “profit maximization” really means. I think it is possible for journalism to “sell-on-value” but it requires perhaps more creativity, bravery and forbearance than current corporate America possesses today.

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